Lara Žagar

Questioning the future is a constant of civilization. At a time when the ecosystem is increasingly buckling under human pressures and the Earth is on the verge of irreversible destruction of long-established equilibria, projections of the future are often apocalyptic in nature. In the process leading to statistical predictions, living or non-living nature as the object of scientific study is most often systematically grouped into collections or repositories of data, which are then used to create models of the future.

If the term terraforming describes the human activity that makes planets a habitable space, the key to artist’s process is the re-terraforming of the Earth after its end. The urbanism of the post-apocalyptic landscape is based on similar principles to the urbanism of our time. In this project Lara Žagar is working on an attempt to inhabit the living in such a carefully urbanised system, which this time is trying to supply itself. The algae that make the ecosystem are placed through the inanimate part of the model through glass tubes created by the thermal deformation of the sand. The organisms will produce more and more oxygen through the photosynthesis they produce. The model is placed on a surface that cannot really be distinguished, and all components float in this non-referenced area.